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Josephine Tolbert’s house is locked. It has a “No Trespassing” sign posted on the front door, but through the small lace-curtained windows at the front of the house, she can still see her daycare business.

It might seem like the worst of the foreclosure crisis is over, but the San Francisco resident is still feeling its impact. Tolbert had lived in her home in the city’s Portola District since 1975, opening a daycare business there in 1995. After running into financial trouble a few years ago, Tolbert was sued and her daycare temporarily shut down. When she fell behind on her payments, Bank of America sold Tolbert’s home in a short sale to real estate company True Compass, who evicted the 75-year-old great-grandmother two weeks ago. The company changed the locks on the house while Tolbert was out.

“We have a little table where the kids draw, and play little games. There’s a radio in the back that plays kiddie music, and they do their little kiddie dance. And its a wonderful daycare, I love it and the kids love it … It is beautiful, I wish you could get in there,” she describes.

Tolbert lived upstairs and ran her business downstairs, making payments steadily over the years. In fact, her house was paid for in 2002, but then she was diagnosed with colon caner.

“I recovered quickly, got back on the road. … I paid them off, and I was still trying to hold onto my home. I work very hard,” Tolbert remembers.

Tolbert’s original payment was about $1,100. After switching between banks, Tolbert eventually came to Bank of America. Due to difficult financial circumstances, Tolbert began writing hardship letter after hardship letter, letting the bank know the circumstances of why she was falling on payments. Eventually, Tolbert had to hire an attorney to help her navigate the complicated process of trying to get a loan modification, but she still ultimately lost her battle.

On the day of the eviction, Tolbert returned to her home after dropping her granddaughter off at school, only to find three or four people standing in front of her house. The bank had taken possession of her home.

“And I was really kind of stunned at that move. They would not allow me to go in to get my medication, they would not allow me to get the baby’s bottles. And the baby, the milk that I had, the baby was breast-fed, and then I could not get that milk, I could not get any diapers. They told me, ‘You can’t go in there, this is our property,’” says Tolbert.

Tolbert points out that it’s nearly impossible for someone of her age to start over again with buying another home. But what hurts most, she says, is the feeling of being powerless in the face of the financial institutions and investors that have taken control of the property.

Despite her recent hardships, Tolbert is optimistic, and says she is working on getting her house back.

“Things like this happen, it makes your self-esteem just really go down, and it makes you feel like a failure, you know. And make you feel like there is no hope. But you know, I’m a fighter … I’m going to find a way to get my house back.”

Early this morning at UC Berkeley, police clearned an Occupy Cal encampment which had been set up for a second time Tuesday night on Sproul Plaza. Almost all campers left voluntarily, except for two who were arrested.

This the latest in a lot of action that has taken place at the campus this week: a university-wide strike, arrests, and police raids. All in the same plaza where more than forty years ago, the Free Speech Movement was born:

MARIO SAVIO [December 2, 1964]: I’ll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we’re the raw material! But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to have any process upon us, don’t mean to be made into any product, don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings! (APPLAUSE)

So what are students fighting for today? Unlike other Occupy camps, UC Berkeley’s has a definite goal – To keep public education public. Student activists have many ideas for ensuring that, and one is blocking an 81% fee hike over the next four years being considered by the board of regents.

KALW’s Joaquin Palomino has been on the ground reporting from UC Berkeley all week and has this report.

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JOAQUIN PALOMINO: On Tuesday, thousands of students gathered in Sproul Plaza for a general strike. Many classes were canceled, others were held outdoors. The purpose of the strike was to draw attention to what many call the privatization of public education. Public funding for the UC system is nearly half of what it was in 1978. And since 2003, tuition has increased more than 300%.

Many also came out to protest a police action that took place November 9.

On November 9, police and protesters clashed for much of the day, and well into the night. Protesters were advised that camping on Sproul Plaza was illegal. Late that evening, police removed tents from the Occupy Cal encampment.

As officers in riot gear used their batons to push peaceful protesters off the plaza, students yelled out to them by name.

The night ended with 39 arrested and many injured students.

Alex Barnard, a second year sociology student, was one of the 39 arrested and GOT a fractured rib from being hit with a police baton. He told his story Monday night at a press conference.

ALEX BARNARD: What happened on Wednesday left me deeply traumatized, I feel both powerless and voiceless. I spent the last few days unable to speak, unable to work, unable to think of anything other then that night. I feel afraid to set foot on campus and return to this place. The image of an officer punching me as I pleaded to be treated peacefully is stuck on repeat in my head.

AXEL BUYERS: Myself, I’m not like a big proponent for setting up encampments just because it’s so confrontational.

Axel Buyers recently transferred to Cal. Although he’s critical of how the police acted that night, he doesn’t support the encampment.

BUYERS: I feel like the police and the army, they are part of the 99% It’s their job to enforce the law, and if it is our choice to break the law and make them our enemy, it’s a very conscious choice and I don’t think we need to necessarily make them our enemies.

The protest and police action November 9 calls to mind a similar scene that took place on this very plaza more than 40 years ago.

It was October 1, 1964. Police broke up a peaceful gathering, kicking off a series of protests and sit-ins that became the Free Speech Movement. Leaders including Mario Savio emerged. Here’s a clip from Savio’s most famous speech on the steps of Sproul Plaza, December 2, 1964:

MARIO SAVIO: There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all! (APPLAUSE)

It so happens that on the night of Tuesday’s student strike, professor of Public Policy and former US secretary of labor Robert Reich gave the Mario Savio Memorial lecture. Reich addressed a crowd of 10,000, commemorating Savio on the same steps where he made his famous speech in 1964.

ROBERT REICH: Some of you may feel a little bit, what are we doing here? What exactly is our goal? I urge you, I urge you to be patient with yourselves. Because with regard to every major social movement of the last half century or more, it started with a sense of moral outrage. Things were wrong. And the actual coalescence of that moral outrage into specific demands for specific changes came later. The moral outrage was the beginning…(CLAPPING) The days of apathy are over folks! (APPLAUSE)

That’s UC Berkeley professor and former US secretary of Labor Robert Reich, giving the Mario Savio memorial lecture Tuesday night. That day, following a general assembly vote to re-establish an Occupy Cal camp, the tents went back up.

Yesterday, students convened in Sacramento in an effort to pressure lawmakers to reinvest in public higher education, and they received a statement of support from the president of UC Berkeley. A group also gathered in San Francisco’s financial district at the Regents Corporate office. 50 people from several schools within the UC system protested within a downtown branch of the Bank of America. They’ve made it clear that if officials don’t take action alongside them, they can expect to see more demonstrations at the University of California.

Economic unrest is at the heart of social movements taking place around the country. But in San Francisco, that wasn’t enough to shake up the political establishment. When voters went to the polls last week, political incumbents carried the day, with George Gascon taking the race for district attorney, and appointed Mayor Ed Lee winning four more years in office.

While those top offices won’t change, the runner up to Lee, City Supervisor John Avalos, isn’t satisfied with the status quo. The popular progressive politician wants San Francisco to take control of its own finances, in part, by creating city–run municipal banks.

JOHN AVALOS: My radical idea is to create a municipal bank, a public bank, here in San Francisco, much like the state of North Dakota has their own state bank in North Dakota.

HOLLY KERNAN: And so how would it work?

AVALOS: Well, the North Dakota model is one where the bank, the state bank, provides what are called “partnership loans” to small financial institutions. It’s not like a retail bank, where you have your ATM card with the State Bank of North Dakota. It’s a bank that provides the support for these other institutions to do loans for small businesses and small property owners and parts of the local economies around the state of North Dakota.

KERNAN: And you have a big stumbling block, which is that the state of California prohibits this…

AVALOS: That’s right. The state of California requires that local municipalities and counties are prudent with their public dollars, which is totally understandable. But is there a way for us to be prudent and still allow us to leverage our public dollars to support our local economies? That’s what we’re going to be exploring with the state of California in the next year or so.

KERNAN: And how much money are we talking about here? How much money does San Francisco have invested in Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and…

AVALOS: And Union Bank. Our city budget is $6.8 billion, but then we have other investments that we have that on a yearly basis. I think are about $11 billion all together. Most of those dollars are in Bank of America, and part by Wells Fargo. We have many, many accounts in all these different banks, but the way that the city runs its financial transactions – a lot of that money is cleared out from these banks on a daily basis. The banks get the money and do transactions to pay our bills, to pay employees, they do all the contract work where money exchanges hands for the city, and then the money is cleared out to other institutions, where the money is invested – very low rate-of-return, but very stable investments.

So, you know, there’s a lot of research we’re going to have to do to crack the nut about how we create our own municipal bank. It’s not something that we’re going to be able to do in a few months time. And so given the fact that we have to change state law to be able to do it, we have a lot of time, a lot of room, to make sure that we do something right, we do it effective, we take steps to do it incrementally. It’s a radical idea, but one that will take a lot of effort and work to create.

KERNAN: And would the city make revenue off of this? I read that the bank of North Dakota made $300 billion in the past decade.

AVALOS: Yeah, the idea is that… is there a way that we could actually build or create a revenue stream through our local bank? That is certainly what we would like to achieve with this idea in San Francisco. North Dakota actually has a surplus where other states do not have surplus with their state budgets. And North Dakota also has a really low unemployment rate. People think North Dakota is just a very rural state, just a farming industry, but it actually has a lot of high tech and has a lot of other industries there as well.

KERNAN: Are there other risks to getting into the banking business?

AVALOS: Well, if you talk to the Chamber of Commerce, the Chamber of Commerce says, “If you pull your money out of these financial institutions then you’re going to force these institutions to go elsewhere, you’re going to lose jobs here in San Francisco.” And right now, that’s the biggest threat of creating any change in this city, is that you’re jeopardizing jobs. And it’s something that, as an elected official and a politician, I have to listen to that all the time and weigh how real that is, or not.

KERNAN: So even though this idea is a long way off, even if it were to be realized, I would imagine just floating is going to have the large banks begin lobbying against this idea. Is there a middle ground here where you could have some clout with the banks and their lending practices?

AVALOS: I have not yet reached out to the banks. I expect that we’ll start that process soon. I know that a lot of the banks feel somewhat put upon by the changes that are coming, that are being proposed, or the ideas that are being generated by the Occupy Wall Street movement and the idea that these banks have benefited from a federal bailout with our tax dollars. And a lot of people, the 99%, don’t feel that these banks have done enough to really support our local economy, to help support households from defaults and foreclosures, are not being flexible enough to support the 99%. That’s part of the dialogue.

So I think that gives me some ability and power to be able to come to the table with a lot of the banks and for the banks to start thinking about they could be more flexible. I understand there are huge constraints that the banks have as well about how they’re going to do their loans and about the whole loan crisis we have right now. We’re not doing a lot of lending right now with these banks. But certainly these banks have to respond to the pressure that’s coming up. They have to respond also to their responsibility, about how they use our public dollars to support people all over the country.

You can hear more of Supervisor Avalos’ thoughts on progressives in San Francisco, the mayor’s race, and the effectiveness of ranked choice voting, here.

The Occupy Wall Street protests have started a national conversation about how capitalism should work – or if it can work at all. But for all the talk about the problems with our financial system, it seems like few workable solutions have emerged. After several large bank bailouts, many people feel powerless. But others are taking action to get that power back.

CHARLIE MINTZ: Can you tell me what you’re doing?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I’m painting a giant foreclosure sign that we’re going to be putting up on the big banks throughout San Francisco to symbolically close them. Move your money.

KALW’s Charlie Mintz recently talked with some San Franciscans about this very issue. Mintz was in Justin Herman Plaza on November 5 – what was called “Bank Transfer Day,” an online campaign to remove money from corporate banks and open accounts at credit unions.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I did it yesterday. My sense of the influence of money in government and power, and all the issues of who is controlling the means.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Jesus kicked the moneylenders out of the temple for doing what our banks do. And he wasn’t particularly peaceful about it. As I like to say, we are being more peaceful than Jesus. We need to get bankers the hell out of running our country.

So what will the impact of this exodus be? Charlie Mintz has some answers.

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CHARLIE MINTZ: To understand the impact of Bank Transfer Day, you need to know some things about banks, and you need to know some things about credit unions. So I talked to someone who knows about both.

DARREL DUFFIE: My name is Darrell Duffie.

Duffie’s a professor of economics at Stanford, and he can tell us a lot about the big banks.

DUFFIE: They are darned big…

Darned big.

DUFFIE: They can be up to 2 trillion or so of loans in their portfolio, which is enormous.

All together the four largest banks – Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, CitiBank, and Bank of America – have about seven trillion dollars in loans on their balance sheet. That’s roughly half the size of the national GDP.

Now let’s compare that to the size of credit unions.

DUFFIE: Well, credit unions are essentially small banks that have a limited set of things that they do.

Because they’re non-profit, credit unions are exempt from income taxes. Banks argue that gives them an unfair competitive advantage. So In response, Congress has limited the amount credit unions can lend out*.

DUFFIE: More or less they’re limited to simple retail deposit taking: loans for homes, cars and small businesses.

Banks have no such requirement. They can lend out as much as they want, provided they keep 10% of their deposits on reserve. So in theory, they can keep growing indefinitely. Meanwhile, the credit unions’ loan cap keeps them small – and makes it harder for them to hold their own.

JAMES KAHN: What we have in the U.S. is kind of a two-tiered system where we have a number of very large banks…

That’s James Kahn, a Professor of Economics at Yeshiva University in New York.

KAHN: The large banks have been getting bigger, and the small banks have been disappearing or getting absorbed into larger institutions.

Kahn’s talking small, for-profit banks, but the same thing can happen to credit unions. Our four biggest banks hold more than four trillion dollars in deposits. That’s 44% of all the deposits in the country.

Meanwhile, the 7,400 credit unions? They’ve got around than $1 trillion in deposits – less than 10% of the country’s deposits. So even when people move about five billion dollars out of big banks and into credit unions, Stanford’s Darrel Duffie says it probably doesn’t much matter.

DUFFIE: Five billion dollars is an enormous amount of money for you or me, but for the large banks, it’s not something they would like to see happen, it’s not going to take them down.

This isn’t just Duffie’s opinion – every economist I spoke with was in agreement on this issue. The big banks just control too much of the country’s total deposits.

KAHN: The too big to fail is still an issue.

Economist James Kahn says, even a few million people moving their money wouldn’t make much of a difference.

KAHN: That’s gonna require more of a political solution.

So deposits – especially relatively small ones – aren’t really that important to these banks. In fact, they might not even want them.

DUFFIE: It happens we’re at a time right now when the large banks actually don’t have as much benefit as they did in the past of having a lot of deposits because they’re flush with cash.

Banks are flush with cash for two reasons. One is that the federal government stepped in big time during the 2008 financial crisis. The Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, basically bought bad assets directly from the banks, to the tune of around $700 billion.

On top of that, the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of additional dollars into the banks. This helped them stay in business, but it didn’t do anything for their second problem: lack of demand.

KAHN: The money’s just sitting there.

James Kahn says banks used to earn profits by paying a certain amount to borrow money from customers, then loaning it back out at higher interest rates.

KAHN: In the boom years of the ‘90s or even first years of last decade the money was going out as fast as it came in.

Two factors have dried up loans. One, the recession has meant businesses are asking for fewer loans. Two, after days of easy lending leading up to the financial crisis, banks are being stricter with who they loan money to, so since they’re no longer using those deposits, the big banks are okay letting small customers go.

KAHN: For smaller deposits, the larger institutions don’t even care that much, because they tend to make more money on the larger deposits anyway. It’s kind of win-win because the larger institutions don’t really value them that much.

A win-win – except for one wrinkle. While it’s true that small deposits are generally unprofitable for banks, those accounts make the banks money in other ways:

REBECCA BORNE: Fees.

Rebecca Borne is an analyst at the Center for Responsible Lending, a national bank watchdog group.

BORNE: Fees play a significant role in the profitability of banks. And they’ve really played an increasing role over the last several years, as banks have been squeezed more on interest rate spreads.

The spread is the difference between what banks pay for money, and what they charge to loan it out – with interest rates at historic lows.

BORNE: Over the last decade or so…

– banks increasingly rely on fees.

BORNE: …back-end, what we call back-end, or hidden fees that tend to be not transparent, and tend to have a significant disproportionate impact on checking account customers who are most struggling financially.

In 2009 the Federal Reserve changed the rules on overdraft fees, so now customers have to opt in. This was supposed to hurt bank revenue, but it’s not clear yet if that’s happening: data from the Sunlight Foundation shows it has. Revenues from fees are actually down from 2009. To compensate, the banks have tried introducing other fees. But that hasn’t gone over so well.

The five dollar debit fee initially proposed by Bank of America, for example, is dead in the water. Just over a month ago, it was proposed by the bank and met with the ire of everyone arranging with consumer groups, congressmen, even President Obama.

Both Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase are abandoning their plans for the $5 debit fee. Yesterday, Sun Trust and Regents Bank announced that they too would be giving up the fee.

One last reason the big banks might actually care about their masses of departing customers: publicity. There was an economic reality behind the bailouts: The big banks controlled too much money to just collapse. But there was a political reality too. Banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo used to have an image as America’s banks. That’s starting to change, and with every switch to a credit union, it changes a little more.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Charlie Mintz.

Did you move your money on Bank Transfer Day? Do you feel good about your bank? Let us know on our Facebook page.

*An earlier version of this story stated that credit unions are only permitted to lend out 12.5 percent of their assets. In fact, that cap only applies to business loans. Consumer loans are not restricted.

Bay Area cities also have varying responses to the Occupy movement. In Oakland, officials are balancing protesters’ First Amendment rights – allowing them to camp out – with keeping the area safe and clean. San Francisco officials are taking a more hard line stance, forcing demonstrators to dismantle encampments… …

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And in Santa Rosa, “Occupy” demonstrators are calling for the withdrawal of public funds from major financial institutions – and a public toilet and the right to camp out. The matter remains in the hands of the City Council, who heard the protestors’ case on Tuesday… …

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Sacramento protesters are also fighting for the right to stay overnight in a city park, but officials there are standing by existing anti-camping rules which prevent the homeless from sleeping in public places… …

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Also on Capitol Hill, California legislators are pressuring the federal government to help millions of people who are trapped in high-interest mortgages, but can’t refinance because their homes are worth less than what they owe… …

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If that happens, the help may come too late for some 70,000 Californians who defaulted on their mortgages during the third quarter of this year. Bank of America and Bank of New York both saw foreclosures jump to levels not seen in a year… …

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Our financial system may be in need of an overhaul, but so does some Bay Area infrastructure. The region ranks highest on a list of metropolitan cities with bridges and overpasses in need of repair… …

The Bay Area shouldn’t expect too much money from the state, though. Cash-strapped California is making a controversial request for medical clinics that treat the poor: pay back money used for dental services over the past year... …